On reading

Whenever I read, I try to achieve one or both of the following:

1. Generate an emotional response (inspiration, entertainment, connectedness etc.)
2. Learn new ideas that help in creating new things and living better

Emotional response

Reading is a great way of escaping the confines of my daily realities. It enables me to discover emotional responses that I am seeking or that are elusive due to the various constraints that my context imposes.

Living a rich life is about going through diverse experiences. My aim is to understand the universe of the available options and optimise situations such that I can do more of the things that I like. Reading helps in both.

The exposure to the entire sample space of emotions can be achieved through reading widely. And the optimisation can be done by reading more of things that strike a chord.

Mindfully immersing in the reading material is key. Evoking of powerful responses is a natural consequence of the immersion.

New ideas

The learning of new ideas sets the foundation of sustained growth. It is the bedrock of creativity. Creativity accelerates and amplifies the generation of economic value. Hence, it becomes critical to read extensively, retain selectively and apply liberally.

I find that new ideas tend to converge. If I stay with a topic for a sufficiently long amount of time, the essence of the idea starts repeating across multiple sources. This is almost always true for fundamental and timeless ideas (like mathematics, human behaviour, evolution etc.).

My natural intellectual curiosity motivates me to read extensively. The repeated occurrence of the common theme solves for retention and its pervasiveness in day-to-day life allows for easy application.

However, not all fields exhibit this convergence. When ideas don’t converge, it often means the field is evolving or naturally diverse, like in social sciences or literature. I approach these subjects slightly differently. I leverage them for fostering critical thinking in real time and increasing my receptiveness to viewpoints that I may not align with. In such cases, extensive reading expands perspective and retention in itself is not of much value as application is usually neither a direct nor frequent consequence.